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In your lifetime what have you dreamed about doing
or being? We all have dreams and I think particularly when we are young
we have big dreams for the future. But often as we go through our lives
things happen which serve to kill our dreams or at least do damage to
them. I remember a minister friend of mine several years ago. He was a
person with whom I played basketball with all the time. We used to go
to the local “Y” and play basketball two or three times a week. He said
to me one day, “You know when I was in my early twenties I wanted to
change the world. Then in my late twenties I wanted to change the
church. Well by the time I got to my early thirties I just wanted to
change my self. Now that I am close to forty all I really want to do is
improve my jump shot.” I knew exactly what he was taking about at the
time. After awhile I couldn’t play basketball anymore so I had to find
another sport.
We all have dreams. The funny thing
about dreams is I really think they have a huge connection to faith.
Human beings have this wonderful capacity to be able to imagine
ourselves in different places and different times. And to imagine what
might happen, to dream, if you will. We can imagine where we might be
in two years or three years. Or where we were ten years ago. Some of
you as you listen to this sermon are imagining what you are going to eat
later. When the football season comes around you will be imagining
watching the game instead of listening to the sermon. I’m just
teasing. It’s an amazing part or our being. We can imagine, we can
dream. Dreaming has a lot to do with faith. This morning we are going
to continue a series of sermons that Buck started with the first one
last week called “Achieving Through Believing”. We are going to look at
the nature of faith. This morning we are going to talk about it in
terms of orienting ourselves toward the future. But to do that we are
going to have to look at some things which we might call “dream killers”
or “faith killers” and then we are going to talk a little bit about what
we might do with those things.
I’m going to read you some scripture.
Bible has a great deal to do with faith and it was hard to chose but
just a couple. First from Jeremiah 29:11, the words are for the elders
of Israel but I also think they have to do with us as well. Very
familiar versus of the Bible from Jeremiah 29:11-14:
11
For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to
prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray
to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will
seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
14 I will be found by you," declares the LORD,
"and will bring you back from captivity.”
From Hebrews 11:1 the nature of faith, notice the future
orientation.
Now faith is the evidence of what we hope for and the
certainty of what we do not see.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me?
Father, help us today and in this
series to see the nature of faith, to see the nature of our faith. That
it may grow and change and become pleasing to you. We lift up this time
Lord, particularly, as we prepare ourselves in hearing the Word for the
supper. We pray Lord you would be with us. Touch our minds and
hearts. Amen.
What is the biggest danger to our
faith? Some people might say, and I think reasonably, that maybe one of
the biggest dangers is the future. After all we look out into the world
and see all kinds of things that are wrong. Even in our own lives
what’s going to happen to us. Will I be able to keep my job? Will my
children grow up healthy and well? What will happen at that doctor’s
appointment I have next week? How long am I going to live? All kinds
of future things which are dangers to us and cause us to worry and can
damage our faith. I have come to believe that the biggest dangers,
maybe not the greatest dangers, but some of the biggest dangers have to
do with the past and with things that are going on in our lives right
now. Faith really does have to do with looking out into the future and
imagining what might happen with God’s help. One of the things that may
be called a dream killer that really hurts us is our family. I know
that as I say that I’m on dangerous ground. I want to say immediately,
that I believe in families. God believes in families. God works through
families. Families are a good thing. But families are also quite
dysfunctional. If you don’t believe me, just look at yours. I look at
mine as well. We all have skeletons in our closets. We all have
problems, some worse than others. Every family has problems. Every
family has dysfunction. All parents have damaged their children. And
all children, in some ways, have rebelled against their parents. It is
the way it goes.
The Bible is full of regular people.
If you want to find dysfunctional families all you have to do is start
reading the Bible and you run into them. One of the biggest
dysfunctional family is the family of Jacob. Jacob wound up with four
wives, twelve different children with those wives and he played
favorites. The story of Joseph is one of the greatest in the Bible
(Genesis 37:5-11, 19-20). Here you had a man who was the tenth in his
family. He was the favorite son of the favorite wife, all kinds of
potential there. Joseph was a dreamer. He had dreams about the
future. They were God given dreams. One day he told his whole family,
“Guess what? I had a dream you are all going to serve me and I’m going
to rule over you.” Now imagine little brother or little sister coming up
in your family and saying, “Guess what? You’re going to serve me.”
Joseph may not have been real smart at this point in telling the dream
quite as dramatically as he did. I think one of the things God had to
work with him on over time was Joseph’s arrogance. I remember saying
that once to somebody once and they said, “How dare you talk about
Joseph that way.” Again, that is what I love about the Bible. God
takes people who have all kinds of problems and makes something out of
them. You know the story. In the end he actually did rule over his
family and all of Egypt. He was second in command. Isn’t that what
happens in families?
Some parents never let their children
grow up. I’ve met some fifty year olds who are still treated like
teenagers by their parents. Some children never grow up because they’re
rebels. Little Johnny gets pegged as a certain thing and he is always
going to be that way. Or Little Susie is always going to be that way.
She fits in there. The family imposes interpretations of someone’s
life. Many times the family can be dream killers, faith busters.
I have a good friend who is a
chaplain who talked about his father. His father was a good man and yet
when he came on the scene his father was such a man that he thought what
you did with your life was simply go be a workingman. You were either a
farmer or worked in the factory or something. Nothing wrong with that
but my friend had a calling to the ministry and later to be a
counselor. His father never understood that until the last year of his
life. He apologized and said, “You know, I never understood you.” How
many times that story has been played out in one way or another?
Another potential dream killer or
faith buster is our friends. Many stories in the Bible about this but
one story in particular of Jairus who was a man whose daughter was sick
until death, she was dying. (Mark 5:35-36) He goes to Jesus to ask that
he might heal her and along the way his friends are saying, “Don’t go
bother the teacher, she’s dying.” Finally, they said, “She is dead,
don’t bother the teacher.” Friends saying “Don’t have any faith. Don’t
see any potential of this man being able to heal.” In Psalm 1 it says,
“Blessed is the one who does not keep the council of the wicked or sit
in the seat of mockers.” Who are those people? They’re sometimes our
friends. Friends who draw us into lifestyles or ways of thinking that
are not appropriate or not good. I think maybe the greatest danger to
our children is not rock and roll music. Or maybe its not drugs and
alcohol which is a huge danger but it may be friends. If you have
friends that are not good they will lead you down a path. I am an
example of that. When I got to college I had friends that were nice
guys but they had lifestyles that were not appropriate. Guess who
followed right into it? It’s not all their fault, I’m not saying that
but friends lead us down certain paths.
Another dream buster maybe fatigue.
In our lifestyles right now we are doing so many things that we are just
too tired. In the Bible we see that story in the prophet Elijah (I
Kings 19:1-10). You had this huge spiritual experience on Mt. Carmel a
defeat of the prophets of Baal. And yet right after that Jezebel comes
after him. It almost as though he looks back into his past and his
memories and says, “Here we go again.” He takes off running. He runs
from the north all the way to the south and along the way he falls down
in exhaustion. An angel comes to him and brings him water and food and
says to him, “get up and eat, you are not strong enough to complete the
journey.” The angel does this a couple of more times until he completes
the journey. If you’re too tired you can’t have any kind of dreams or
faith in the future.
The fourth thing might be the past.
There is a great story in the Bible of the children of Israel. As the
Israelites are leaving Egypt and they get to the Red Sea. Before them
in the sea, what is going to happen? How are they going to get across?
It wasn’t that they were worried about. Because low and behold guess
who was coming down the pike? The Egyptians changed their minds and
started coming after the Israelites. They were no longer worried about
the Red Sea being front of them. They were worried about the Egyptians
killing them. The story is true but there is symbolism here. The
future challenge disappeared in their minds when all the stuff from the
past began chasing them. The future challenge of getting through this
ocean disappeared when they had the past coming after them. What did
God do? God didn’t go ahead of them he planted himself behind his
Shekinah Glory and stood in between them and the Egyptians. You know
the story, the ocean splits, they go through all the while God is
guarding their six as we say in the military. The things from our past
and their past like slavery, hardship, death, heartache, all those
things came rushing past them. They even said to Moses, “Why did you
bring us out into the desert? Just give us back to the Egyptians.” Give
us back to the past. God stands in between them and their past and
provides for their future.
Which leads us to the fifth thing,
another dream killer is simply failure. There are so many stories in
the Bible of failure. One of the best is Peter. Peter had a dream too.
He was going to be the leader. He was going to be the guy out front and
he often was. But remember the story how he said, “Oh Jesus, if they
all fall away, I will never fall away.” You know what happened. He
denied Jesus three times. But that is not the glory of the story it
goes on. Jesus sat with Peter by the lake after the resurrection and
forgave him. We all fail. There is a lot in our past that comes up.
It keeps us from believing in the future. “Chris will never amount to
anything, he’s not that smart.” “Johnny will never be able to play that
instrument. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.” “He’s not athletic.
He won’t be able to do that.” “You really should go get a job in the
factory instead of being a counselor.” We have all kinds of things in
the past, all kinds of things that we’ve done and hurt others and have
been hurt. We’re not only sinners we’ve been sinned against. All that
baggage is there. Peter had a lot of baggage too. Lots of baggage and
Jesus forgave him. Do you know what the biggest need the world needs
now? It’s not the song “what the world needs now is love sweet love”,
but specifically, the kind of love we need is forgiveness. We need to
have forgiveness from God. I talk a lot about evangelism. Helping
people know about Jesus. It’s really helping them know that they can be
forgiven. More than that, it is forgiving ourselves. When Peter looked
at Jesus after he denied Jesus three times he had to forgive himself.
We need to forgive others as well. We’re so full of resentment, so full
of baggage, so full of the memories of the past that keeps us from going
to the future.
What can we do about all that? There
are lots of things but just a few for today. I’m going to ask you to
pray about your own life. What does God want you to do? I don’t care
how old you are. What does God want you to do and be? We all need a
future to work toward. We all need a vision, a God given vision. Pray
for wisdom. Remember as we went through James a while back, “If any of
you lacks wisdom let him ask God who gives to all generously.” How many
decisions do we make without even praying about them? So many things we
never pray about until we make them and later on they are going wrong
and we yell, “Help!”
Another chaplain friend that I worked
with over the past couple of weeks we were talking and he shared with
me. We were talking about Proverbs 3:5-6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own
understanding but in all your ways acknowledge Him.
That is, simply pray about it. In all
your ways acknowledge Him,
he’s the boss.
in all your ways acknowledge Him
and he will direct your paths. He
said, “You know, that’s my life verse.” I said, “Me too.” I don’t
always follow it but my life verse, one of them. Pray for wisdom.
Stretch your imagination. Paul says
in Ephesians 3:20 He is able to do
immeasurably more than you ask or imagine.
There’s a challenge there. How many of us believe it? He is able to do
immeasurably more than you ask or imagine. Stretch your imagination.
Don’t let your God be too small. Don’t try to fit God in a box.
Establish a goal. It’s okay to have
goals. Paul says Philippians 3:13-14 I
press on toward the goal I have in Jesus Christ.
He talks a lot about eternity. He talks about wanting to be with Jesus
more than he wants to be here. Its okay to have goals in this life as
well. If you don’t have goals, you’re just sitting around letting it
all happen to you what kind of faith is that?
Visualize the results. Hebrews 11:1
Faith is the
evidence of things not seen.
The secular mind says, “Faith is believing you know isn’t so.” But the
biblical definition faith is the evidence of things not seen. There is
an old philosophical problem about does God exist? I studied a lot of
philosophy and that is one of the biggest questions. There was a
philosopher that talked about a garden. There was this garden and he
had various ways of sitting in the garden waiting to see if the gardener
showed up. His conclusion was that since the gardener never showed up
was that there wasn’t a gardener. In other words, a parable of the
world, if we haven’t seen God, God does not exist. What about the
garden? What about the evidence of things not seen? Faith is based on
evidence. Visualize the results. There is evidence in your life that
God is working.
Commit your dream to God’s care. Again Proverbs 3:5-6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean
not on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge Him. He
will direct your paths.
Last but not least, I will return to
the memories. Give God your memories. Many memories are wonderful but
of course many are not. Life is tough. Many of us have been pegged or
put in this box or have had damage done to us by others or ourselves,
the world has not treated us well. Give your memories to God. Let God
and his Shekinah Glory stand between your past and you and that will
enable you to go through the Red Sea of your life, to go into the
future. Give God your past. It begins right here (the Lord’s Table).
We are reminded to remember the Lord’s body and shed for us. Healing
begins right here.
In the name of the Father, and the
Son and the Holy Spirit let us pray.
Father in heaven thank you for
healing us of all that is wrong, the process of healing, Lord, we thank
you. We thank you for Jesus who heals us. We pray that His healing
would continue to work in our bodies and our minds and our souls, that
we might have faith, faith that looks to the future, of not only
eternity but our lives right now. Hope based on evidence that are real
and yet not seen. Now father, prepare our hearts, help us to know your
presence and your love as we have heard your Word and now partake of the
Holy Supper. In Jesus name, Amen.
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